Teaching Children What Love Is
Extracted from 'Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth.'
How many people know what love is?
In an extract from his book, Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth, Barry Long shows how love can be demonstrated so that a child will grow up with the substantive experience and knowledge of love.
We have to teach our children what love is. Otherwise they pick up the world's notion of love; the same ignorance and confusion that we ourselves acquired from the world.
'Nanny sends her love to you.'
'For your birthday, with lots of love from Uncle Jack.'
The greeting on the card, the token love of everyday talk, makes love as unreal as the love in a doll or pet rabbit.
The man who privately says 'I don't really know what love is' turns to his child and says 'I love you.' Such is the ignorance of a world where men and women do not live what they say and the common condition is utter confusion about love.
We have to make love more substantive than mere words. To show children what love is we must encourage them to feel the love in their own bodies; because real knowledge is the experience of our own body. I suggest you sit down with the child at an early age and have a cuddle together. Don't just give a hug. There must be depth to the experience. There must be the warmth of love.
'Mummy and Daddy love you. Can you feel the warmth of our love? Do you feel the firmness in my embrace?'
First embrace the child firmly and then give a half-hearted sort of hug. 'Now, do you feel the difference? There's no firmness, no meaning in it, is there? Whereas, if I hug you with love, you can feel the love in it.
'Now I'll take my arms away. Do you feel what happens?
'Come and let me cuddle you again. Do you feel the warmth again?'
In this way you begin to demonstrate the real warmth of love in the embrace. There are two aspects to it. The first is the temperature, the warmth of the physical body, which is superficial. The second and deeper warmth is psychic. My body warmth is given me by life. Psychic warmth is given me by my consciousness. As I consciously bring love into me I bring warmth into my psyche. When I communicate my love psychically it is a far more potent and lasting warmth.
You can recognise this in your own adult love-life. We are all children of the earth who yearn for the warmth of the love of man or woman. We are always looking to be and to receive this invisible, immeasurable quality of psychic warmth.
Demonstrating Love
We have to demonstrate to the children what love is, and also we have to show them where it is. When the time is right, sit down together, Mum, Dad and child. Pick your time, to suit the child's attention span.
'Let's sit down and have a game. This is a game of discovery. We're going to show you where love is. Now, do you love Mummy?'
'Yes,' the child says.
'Where do you feel your love of Mummy?'
The child is likely to indicate the tummy region.
'You feel you love Mummy there?'
'Yes.'
'And Daddy? Same place?'
'Yes, yes.'
The purpose is to transfer the notion of love into a bodily sensation. Then the child will grow up with the substantive experience of love: 'Ah yes! I feel love. That's where my love is.'
There are many opportunities to teach this: 'Do you see the little bird over there? Isn't it lovely to hear it sing? Do you love it? Can you feel the love of it in you?'
If you can introduce a child to the substantive feeling of love in the youngest years, then later on, when the body starts to zing with sexual energy, the feeling of love will be unmistakable.
The Sensation of Love
If a child doesn't get it the first time and points to his head, for instance, rather than his tummy, I would say: 'Do you really feel it there? I don't think so. The head doesn't have much feeling really. I feel it down here, across the top of my tummy. It's got a sort of a warmth in it.'
Go on directing the child's attention to the sensation. 'Do you feel anything in your tummy? You know how when you have your breakfast in the morning, you can feel the warmth of the cornflakes down in your tummy? The warmth is a form of love. That's because the body grows on love and food is a form of love for the body. We have something called digestion, which is a process that goes on down in our tummies. The digestion turns food into energy, which makes it possible for us to walk around and see the world. It's like putting fuel onto a sort of fire down in our stomachs. So love is like that. It has warmth in it.
'Now, do you see the lovely leaves on the trees? Just have a look at them. Can you see the changing colours in the autumn leaves with the western sun catching them in all their glory? Isn't that lovely? That's the same feeling of love. Can you feel it? ... Yes? You can still feel it, can't you – the beauty of what you've seen?
So, you see, you don't have to think about love. We can't think about it. We feel it. And it's a good sensation, isn't it?'
The more you speak to small children like that the more you communicate that love is a sensation – not the notional love that most people tend to carry around in their heads. The more experience they have of the physical sensation of love in their own bodies, the more prepared they are for sexual love later in life. As they grow up they will increasingly enter the mental world and gradually lose touch with sensation until the sexual drive brings them back into their bodies in adolescence. Being in the body as much as possible in the earlier years will help them later when they pass through the inevitable pain of sexual confusion and disappointment.
A Prayer for Life